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Ryugu · Saxum · 9th largest named feature

Otohime Saxum

Otohime Sama; princess in Japanese fairy tale, sea mistress, who welcomed fisherman Urashima Taro in undersea Ryugu Palace and gave him a parting gift, a jewel box whose lid he was told never to open.

What Otohime Saxum is

Otohime Saxum is a saxum — a boulder or rock — on Ryugu, 0.2 km across, centred at 69.8° S, 85.6° W. It is the 9th largest named feature on Ryugu and the 1st largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Otohime Sama; princess in Japanese fairy tale, sea mistress, who welcomed fisherman Urashima Taro in undersea Ryugu Palace and gave him a parting gift, a jewel box whose lid he was told never to open. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2018, under the theme it applies to every saxum on Ryugu. Of the 3 features of this class catalogued on Ryugu, the naming categories run Japan (2), United States (1).

Feature class
a boulder or rock
Diameter
0.2 km
about 5.0 times shorter than a 10-minute walk
Coordinates
69.8° S, 85.6° W
Planetocentric, on Ryugu
Name approved
2018
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Naming category
Japan
Asia

What it would take to settle Otohime Saxum

Ryugu scores 58.1 as a world. That number is the same for every square metre of it — but sunlight, water, radiation and the ground under your feet are not. This is the same question asked at 69.8° S, 85.6° W.

Settlement difficulty here
63/ 100
Harder than most of this world
Ryugu overall
58.1
4.9 harder than the median site
Ranked
13th
of 13 named places on Ryugu

What this spot has going for it is known ground 1 km from Hayabusa2 touchdown (2019). What works against it is sunlight 35% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Ryugu gets.

Computed from Otohime Saxum's catalogued latitude, longitude and feature class — 74% of the model's weight had a basis here, and 2 axes were dropped as not applicable to Ryugu (radiation geometry, earth link). Gravity, pressure, delta-v and distance from the Sun are the same everywhere on Ryugu and are already counted in the world's own index, not again here.

What this cannot see: elevation. Slope, local shadowing and the polar “peaks of eternal light” — ridge tops near the poles of a barely tilted world that catch sun almost continuously while a crater floor kilometres away never does — need a terrain model this does not have. Where a real mission targets a pole, that is usually why.

What is next to it

The largest saxum features on Ryugu